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Next week, a small tribe of people will be out roaming the streets around Parliament Hill, looking for a new place to swap stories and information over after-work cocktails.

Hy’s, the restaurant where so much of that professional shmoozing has taken place for 30 years in Ottawa, permanently closes its doors this weekend, leaving a huge hole in the social fabric of the capital.

Those 30 years, incidentally, precisely span the period between Trudeaus in the highest political office in Canada.

Hy’s opened in 1985, a year after Pierre Trudeau left power, and around the time that the lobbying business was getting into full swing in Ottawa. John Sawatsky’s important book on the emerging lobbying trade in Canada, The Insiders, was published in 1987 and I still recommend it to political rookies, if only for the glimpse it offers of the capital as it worked in those days.

This was the era when people — not just lobbyists, but journalists and politicos too — would exchange information over leisurely, long lunches. Yes, the “two-martini lunch” was a real thing back then (though I should confess I’ve never really understood why people like martinis.) Hy’s, with its dark, carpeted bar and adjoining steak house lined with curved, velvet booth seating, was an ideal place to trade secrets or story tips.

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Jean Chrétien, who was taking a break from elected politics in the late 1980s, could often be seen lunching at Hy’s while plotting his return to power. Even after he became prime minister in 1993, Chrétien would still pay occasional visits to Hy’s. One of my more enduring memories of him in the bar, though, came after he had stepped down.

It was on a Friday night in March 2009, not long after the well-liked former Liberal MP Doug Frith had unexpectedly died of a heart attack at age 64. Several of Frith’s old friends had decided to quietly toast him at his favourite spot at the bar in Hy’s. The rest of the bar was packed with the usual, noisy Friday-night crowd, oblivious to the tiny tribute taking place in a far corner.

Out of the blue, Chrétien turned up, saying he’d come to pay his respects and join in the toast. As soon as Chrétien started to speak — just a couple of sentences, really, on how Frith had been a great guy — the rest of the bar fell silent. I always thought that was a quintessential Ottawa moment: only in a political city could a Friday-night bar crowd be brought to silence by the sound of a former prime minister’s voice.

Stephen Harper didn’t hang out much at Hy’s, before or after he became prime minister, but I had at least a couple of lunches with him there in the past. I recall Harper being the only person I’d ever seen order the nachos that were briefly among the menu offerings at Hy’s.

When Jack Layton’s New Democrats were keen to boast of their new, high-profile Quebec recruit in 2007, they brought Thomas Mulcair to the crowded patio at Hy’s. My last sighting of Layton, I believe, was in Hy’s in June 2011, when he popped into the bar and heartily shook hands all around, clearly delighted in his new role as Opposition leader. Less than two months later, Layton died of the cancer that returned that summer.

Justin Trudeau couldn’t be called a regular patron of Hy’s, but it hasn’t been unusual to see him there from time to time. Late last spring, Trudeau slipped into the bar with his wife, Sophie Grégoire, and stopped to say hello to a table full of politicos and journalists. Trudeau said they were off to see a play at the National Arts Centre, and were having a quick dinner beforehand. “A date,” he said. They were left alone at their table in the corner.

That was the thing about Hy’s. It was a place where you could come to do political business, or to take a break from it. The same pundits who argued on CBC’s political panels would cross the street afterward and share glasses of wine at Hy’s. On budget night every year, Hy’s bar was a mob scene of political people and journalists, haggling over what was the biggest news that day.

The biggest news at Hy’s these past few months has been its imminent demise — the result of an irresolvable dispute over a proposed rent increase. The Hy’s chain, which boasts similar bars in five other Canadian cities, has no plans to reopen elsewhere in Ottawa.

Lots of things come and go in Ottawa’s revolving-door political culture — governments, politicians, even journalists, too. But Hy’s, over 30 years, often seemed like the immovable centre of that ever-changing world. It will be missed.

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